Coloramas: color happens, now at MACA Alicante

In the spring of last year, we had the opportunity to visit the Madrid headquarters of the Juan March Foundation “You have to see it. The autonomy of color in abstract art”, an exhibition that, beyond taking color as a thematic axis, intended for it to take on the form of an exhibition in itself and, therefore, for the public to notice it as an event.

As Walter Benjamin, who also had words for this, explained, there is no way to understand it that does not go through perception: Color arises in the most intimate part of fantasy, because it is only a quality, it is not at all a substance nor does it refer to one. That is why colors have become symbols for those who lack fantasy. In color the eyes are applied purely to the spiritual, color spares the creator’s path through form in nature. It allows the senses, in their pure absorption, to encounter directly the spiritual, with harmony. Whoever sees is totally immersed in the color, looking at the color means sinking his gaze into other people’s eyes, which devour him: the eyes of fantasy. The colors see themselves, pure looking is found in them and they are its object and organ at the same time. Our eyes have colors. Color is produced in the gaze and colors the pure gaze.

That exhibition had a precedent – the one that the same institution gave in 2009 to Carlos Cruz-Díez in Cuenca and Palma, in order to review his investigations into the experiential possibilities of the palette – and it also now has a sort of continuation, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante. MACA.

Of color in art (Coloramas). MACA Alicante, 2026

Of color in art (Coloramas). MACA Alicante, 2026

There we can visit, until next September, “Del color en el arte (Coloramas)”, which is the result of the collaboration between both institutions and which has works from the collections of the center of Alicante (own collections and deposits) and dating back to the last seventy-five years.

These are very diverse pieces, in terms of authors, styles and techniques, which have in common embodying different options in the expressive and experimental use of color, and are accompanied on the journey by two particular and complementary spaces. The first, prior to the visit itself, corresponds to a small cabinet of curiosities in which attendees will be able to delve into the origins of color through minerals, dye plants, pigments, natural dyes and also their applications in textiles.

We will also see samples of synthetic and industrial pigments, testimonies of inventions – such as the patent for color in tubes – and documents alluding to the ideological, political and social symbolism that, over the centuries, the different shades took on. The collected materials have been lent by the Royal Santa Bárbara Tapestry Factory in Madrid and Ana Roquero, dye expert and collector.

The second space, after the presentation, proposes an immersive experience in an environment that refers to ancient slideshows, in which slides from several devices were projected simultaneously, to camera obscuras or zoetropes, animations that generated the illusion of movement. There, an audiovisual story summarizes the history of color, from its consideration as a physical phenomenon to its perceptual construction and its subsequent use from symbolic language.

This project is completed by an educational classroom in which reflection and play will take place. Call Chromatic thresholdwill allow the public to experiment with color mixtures through subtraction and addition systems, taking into account light or the absence of it.